New Google Earth Imagery – May 16

May 16, 2012

Less than two weeks after their previous update, it appears that Google has just pushed out some more fresh imagery to Google Earth. Thanks to ‘Munden’ for letting us know about it!

As is almost always the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn’t in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what’s new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they’re not identical, that means that you’ve found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!

About Mickey Mellen

Mickey has been using Google Earth since it was released in 2005, and has created a variety of geo-related sites including Google Earth Hacks. He runs a web design firm in Marietta, GA, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

For the UK there needs to be WIDESPREAD updates. When you have whole shopping centres, business parks, guided busways, new roads, even whole towns and villages etc that aren’t shown as they have happened since 2006 when most of the aerial views seem to be from.
It’s getting to the point where it’s of little use for some tasks.

Most of the USA has high-resolution imagery, yet there is still one area of the Lower 48 states with a lot of low-resolution imagery: the desert of Southeastern Oregon (i.e. around Burns Junction and Jordan Valley). However, you can get some high-res imagery of that region from 2003 and 2006 by using the “historical imagery” tab. It’s not the best quality of imagery but still better than the low-res. Hmmm…

@ Kevin – check all previous update KMLs, and you’ll find as much updating and high res coverage in the UK as most other parts of the world, although getting good coverage of Scotland was notoriously slow.
Don’t know where all that development in the UK is, as the place is not exactly booming

I see SE Oregon now has complete imagery with the remainder of the region having imagery from 6/30/2005. Still can only be seen using the Historical Imagery tab, but the black-and-white 1994 images aren’t all that can be seen there.

@ Kyle – maybe Street View outside the “major downtown urban centres” of the US, and possibly places in Aus, NZ and Japan needs a makeover, but elsewhere it is a superb addition to GE and Maps.
The best viewing/least distortion is still via Maps in full screen, and it would be nice to see GE catch up here.
Also great to see Estonia and Latvia added a few days ago – green and forested countries, looking relatively untouched by modern clutter imho.

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